The announcement that standard assessment tasks (SATs) for 14-year-olds are to be abolished has been greeted with, it appears, universal acclaim. This fact alone should make us pause. When the teaching unions, the educational establishment and the commentators are united in approval, it is a fair bet that something must be wrong.

This is not to defend SATs as they are. It is true that the national curriculum is too prescriptive. British children are, indeed, tested too much. The education system has been, for too long, seized by a Gradgrindian concern with facts, in the service of results measured in employability. Ministers have, with enthusiastic philistinism, lined up to declare they do not see the point in learning for its own sake. No doubt, too, the information yielded to teachers did not tell them much about their classes that they did not already know.

That said, there is something more alarming in the chorus of praise for their abolition than a paean to creativity. The value of formal tests was not just what they told teachers. It was what they told parents. If schools are to be answerable to parents - as they ought to be - then parents need to make informed choices. They cannot make informed choices, evidently enough, without reliable information.

Good information improves school standards in two ways. It allows parents to exert a considered pressure on the school and it means schools are themselves made transparently aware of the progress they are, or are not, making. The best teachers in the best schools have always done this. But they are too few. No system in which, in the Holme Wood area of south Bradford, for example, only 3.3 per cent of teenagers achieved five good GCSEs including English and mathematics, can be left without scrutiny.

So, if the unintended burdens of SATs are too onerous, we need to replenish the information provided to parents in other ways. We could do worse than emulate the new system of Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York City. Since 2006, every one of the 1,300 public sector schools in New York has been given a report card on which a grade is starkly imprinted, on a scale of A to F. This is no perfunctory exercise. If a school is graded F for two consecutive years the head is replaced. If it fails to improve after a further two years, it is unceremoniously closed down. Schools that show the greatest progress are eligible for bonus payments.

The New York system is cleverly organised so that all possible excuses are anticipated and disallowed. Unsophisticated grading does nothing more than describe the traits of a school's intake. But in New York schools are compared, not with the whole city, but to 40 “peer schools” that draw their pupils from similar backgrounds. Neither is the grade a single measure: 55 per cent of the score is calculated by the progress that students have made over the year; 30 per cent from their absolute performance in tests. The remaining 15 per cent comes from extracurricular activities.

Here the weightings could, of course, be different. The important point is that parents get good information that all parties take seriously. Three years ago New York copied from the UK the idea of external assessment. This country ought now to repay the compliment.